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DRM In JPEGs? (eff.org)
JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Adding DRM to JPEG files is being considered by the Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG), which oversees the JPEG format. The JPEG met in Brussels today to discuss adding DRM to its format, so there would be images that could force your computer to stop you from uploading pictures to Pinterest or social media. The EFF attended the group's meeting to tell JPEG committee members why that would be a bad idea. Their presentation(PDF) explains why cryptographers don't believe that DRM works, points out how DRM can infringe on the user's legal rights over a copyright work (such as fair use and quotation), and warns how it places security researchers at legal risk as well as making standardization more difficult. It doesn't even help to preserve the value of copyright works, since DRM-protected works and devices are less valued by users.
That is until - whoops! - you have your DRM chip manufactured in China and pretty soon anyone can buy a DRM stripper for under $20.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If JPEG finally implemented DRM, then more people would switch.
You are missing the point... Even if JPEG implements DRM, it doesn't force you to use DRM on the photos you create. You can still take photos, draw images, etc., and not enable DRM on them. So people who currently create JPEGs can continue to use them and don't need to "switch". The problem with DRM is when other people put them on the images they send you. E.g., you browse some website and you see there a DRMed JPEG. How can you "switch" to PNG here?? You didn't create this JPEG, someone else did it, and they did so deliberately.
What users can do, however, is to not even try to get their content from the official publisher (because it uses some annoying DRM) but rather get the same content from a "pirate" which broke this DRM and converted the content to a more useful format. This is what people have been doing for years for video. I, for example, never use actual DVDs any more (my living-room "DVD player" is stash away in the attic) - I always rip my DVDs to an unencrypted ".vob" file before watching them, and avoid all sorts of region locks, mandatory ads, and other crap the publisher thought he could force on me in the pretense of "copyright".
Now the difference between the file size of a lossy JPEG and PNG is negligible
What are you talking about? The difference in file size is arbitrary because you can set the quality of a JPEG to whatever suits your purposes.
With JPEG you get horrible colour blocks and banding artefacts. It ruins most pictures.
So set the quality a bit higher. You'll still beat PNG in filesize for photographic images, enough that pages will load visibly faster.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Have you read "The Right to Read"?
Thing is, all the technology it describes is possible now, and even in use on some platforms (think iOS, where all apps must be signed by Apple, and apps are specifically prohibited from allowing the execution of arbitrary code). The only gap is in legislation, but that legislation continues to be pushed forward aggressively.
The author of that nifty little program could well find themselves in a nifty little jail cell. They've already tried it, more than once ; and they will keep trying, with the force of these new international treaties like TPP behind them.
Most professional photographers don't use JPG either, we take pictures in RAW - storing as much information losslessly as possible.
JPG is something you export to for the low-quality versions you put in web based portfolios. For printing you use a lossless format like TIFF pre-sized correctly to page size (because auto-scaling tends to ruin shots) but what you save and store are camera RAW formats (CR2 for canon) which allows you maximum post-processing ability.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *